The (In)visibility of Systemic Victimization: A Reading of Rupa Bajwa’s The Sari Shop

This contribution explores the ideas of "victimhood" and "vulnerability" from a philosophical perspective, with primary reference to Michel Foucault's concept of "regimes of truth —régimes de véridiction"(1979) as well as to Fassin and Rechtman’s recent book The Empire of Trauma (2009), a work documenting a gradual shift in cultural attitudes towards the victim in the 20th Century and attributing it to: “two orders of facts, one relating to the history of science and medicine, and one linked to an anthropology of sensibilities and values.” In line with these premises, a detailed study of Rupa Bajwa’s novel The Sari Shop is presented, in order to demonstrate the synergic role that literature can play with medicine and antrhopology at the level of epistemological and cultural transformations. I argue that literature and art play a crucial role in providing cultural visibility to “facts” and “situations” routinely veiled in order to uphold a certain status quo. Literature has the power of enlightening the attitudes and values that determine the codification of social behaviour, as well as the power of showing “the unsaid” in certain regimes of truth, and “what goes without saying” in the politics of representation.